page_title: Chicano
section_title: Early recorded usage
hierarchical_section_title: Chicano / Usage of terms / Early recorded usage
caption_attribution_description: English: Town of Chicana on the Americae Sive Quartae Orbis Partis Nova Et Exactissima Descriptio (1562)
context_page_description: Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for people of Mexican descent born in the United States. The identity may also appear as Xicano or Xicana. The identity is sometimes used interchangeably with Mexican-American, although both terms have different meanings. In the 1940s and 1950s, prior to the Chicano Movement, Chicano/a was widely used as a classist term of derision, although it had already been adopted by some pachucos as an expression of defiance to Anglo-American society. Chicano/a was widely reclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s to express political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of Indigenous descent, diverging from the assimilationist Mexican-American identity. Many Chicano/a youth in barrios rejected cultural assimilation into whiteness and embraced pachuco/a and cholo/a identities as countercultural symbols of resistance.
context_section_description: The town of Chicana was shown on the Gutiérrez 1562 New World map near the mouth of the Colorado River, and is probably pre-Columbian in origin. The town was again included on Desegno del Discoperto Della Nova Franza, a 1566 French map by Paolo Forlani. Scholar Roberto Cintli Rodríguez places the location of Chicana at the mouth of the Colorado River, near present-day Yuma, Arizona. An 18th century map of the Nayarit Missions used the name Xicana for a town near the same location of Chicana, which is considered to be the oldest recorded usage of the term.
  A gunboat, the Chicana, was sold in 1857 to Jose Maria Carvajal to ship arms on the Rio Grande. The King and Kenedy firm submitted a voucher to the Joint Claims Commission of the United States in 1870 to cover the costs of this gunboat's conversion from a passenger steamer. No explanation for the boat's name is known.
  The Chicano poet and writer Tino Villanueva traced the first documented use of the term as an ethnonym to 1911, as referenced in a then-unpublished essay by University of Texas anthropologist José Limón. Linguists Edward R. Simmen and Richard F. Bauerle report the use of the term in an essay by Mexican-American writer, Mario Suárez, published in the Arizona Quarterly in 1947. There is ample literary evidence to substantiate that Chicano is a long-standing endonym, as a large body of Chicano literature pre-dates the 1950s.
caption: Closeup of the Gutiérrez 1562 New World map. The town of Chicana is listed in the upper left of the map, which is the earliest recorded usage of Chicana/o.[36]
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